FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ESPIONAGE - PAGE 3

Not long ago, Vivian Hanssen gave up her friends and bridge invitations, sold her retirement home in Florida and packed up her wide, beige Oldsmobile with the seat cushion that props her small frame a little closer to the wheel. At 89, she moved to the suburbs of Washington, where she knows almost no one, to live in the home her only son left behind when he went to jail. "My son really wanted me to come here," she says of the bark-colored house where she now lives with her son's wife, Bonnie, along a street of gardens and driveway basketball hoops in Vienna, Va. "We thought we could help one another.

The highest-ranking CIA officer ever caught spying was sentenced Thursday to more than 23 years, averting life in prison after prosecutors said the former CIA station chief cooperated with investigators. Harold J. Nicholson, who admitted selling secret documents to Russian officials at four overseas meetings, pleaded guilty to espionage in March and agreed to forfeit his spy gains and any future profit from sale of his story for books or movies. Nicholson admitted to a single charge that he conspired since June 1994 to commit espionage by selling Moscow national defense documents.

A Russian military court on Wednesday handed down an 18-year prison term to a counterintelligence colonel arrested on espionage charges amid a fiery U.S.-Russian spy row in 2001. The arrest of Alexander Zaporozhsky, 52, that year coincided with a low point in post-Cold War relations between Moscow and Washington, when the Bush and Putin administrations exchanged accusations of espionage activity and responded with mutual diplomatic expulsions. In March 2001, the Bush administration accused 50 Russian diplomats of espionage and expelled them from Washington.

I have a partial solution to the United States` espionage problems. First, make the penalty for providing sensitive security information to a foreign country life in prison or death. Then, have all employees of the U.S. government, the military and the defense industry sign a statement saying that they are aware of the penalty for espionage. This will not stop everyone, but it may stop many others who have not given serious thought to the consequences of their actions.

Shi Pei Pu, a Chinese operatic soprano who along with his French lover was convicted of espionage and whose complicated affair inspired the Tony Award-winning Broadway play "M. Butterfly" and movie of the same title, died June 30 in Paris. He was 70. Shi had been working as a librettist and soprano for the Beijing Opera when he met Bernard Boursicot in 1964. Boursicot, then a 20-year-old clerk working for the French Embassy in Beijing, later said the relationship started platonically.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, who provided classified government documents to Wikileaks detailing, among other things, America's undisclosed instances of torture, was found guilty of five counts of espionage on Tuesday. The verdict came on the 235th anniversary of the passage of America's first whistle-blower protection law, approved by the Continental Congress after two Navy officers were arrested for having reported the torture of British prisoners. How have we gotten to a place where the revelation of torture is no longer laudable whistle-blowing but instead counts as espionage?

Arthur Walker, the retired Navy lieutenant commander found guilty of seven counts of espionage, will appeal the convictions for which he received three life sentences, his attorneys said. U.S. District Judge J. Calvitt Clarke Jr. sentenced Walker to three life terms plus 40 years, all to be served concurrently.

A retired U.S. intelligence officer gave the Soviet Union "enormous" amounts of sensitive military information while working as a KGB spy in Germany during the Cold War, a federal prosecutor told jurors Tuesday at the start of the former officer's espionage trial. The defendant, retired Army Col. George Trofimoff, 74, of Melbourne, Fla., is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage. Trofimoff, who has pleaded not guilty, faces life in prison if convicted.